Stimulating School Reform: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Shifting Federal Role in Education

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), aimed at stimulating and stabilizing the American economy during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, reflects significant new dimensions of federal action in the area of educational reform. In addition to saving jobs in the educator workforce, the ARRA was designed to spark the implementation of specific reform strategies in states and schools and lay a foundation for the Obama administration\u27s subsequent educational reform efforts, including the impending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. While the goals of the educational reform provisions of the ARRA are laudable, the ARRA oversteps the limits of effective federal action. The educational reform provisions of the ARRA face many potential pitfalls given the historical characteristics of federal educational reform \u27from the capitol to the classroom, the scientific evidence underlying the reforms encouraged by the ARRA, and the current political climate. Although many of these pitfalls are now unavoidable, reform efforts that build on the ARRA but focus on managing the teacher workforce, balance issues of local and federal authority in a more nuanced way, and draw more strongly on educational research offer much promise for more effective federal action in educatio

The Promises and Pitfalls of Teacher Evaluation and Accountability Reform

This chapter examines the recent wave of laws aimed at enhancing teacher evaluation and accountability, and recommends strategies for moving forward in a way that holds greater promise for providing students with more equal and greater educational opportunities. First, this chapter provides a historical overview of the legal landscape governing the primary functions of the teacher workforce. Second, the major characteristics of this new wave of laws are examined. Third, the strengths and potential pitfalls entailed by these laws are analyzed in light of educational research. Finally, this chapter offers recommendations for improving teacher evaluation and accountability laws in a way that offers significantly more promise for equalizing and improving students\u27 educational opportunities

The Promises and Pitfalls of Teacher Evaluation and Accountability Reform

This chapter examines the recent wave of laws aimed at enhancing teacher evaluation and accountability, and recommends strategies for moving forward in a way that holds greater promise for providing students with more equal and greater educational opportunities. First, this chapter provides a historical overview of the legal landscape governing the primary functions of the teacher workforce. Second, the major characteristics of this new wave of laws are examined. Third, the strengths and potential pitfalls entailed by these laws are analyzed in light of educational research. Finally, this chapter offers recommendations for improving teacher evaluation and accountability laws in a way that offers significantly more promise for equalizing and improving students\u27 educational opportunities

Teacher Evaluation and Collective Bargaining: The New Frontier of Civil Rights

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

From Governance to the Classroom: Rethinking Large-Scale School Reform to Improve Educational Opportunity and Equity

For decades, governmental institutions have focused on improving and equalizing the educational opportunities for students. Courts, legislatures, and chief executive officers at federal and state levels have spearheaded a range of large-scale educational reform efforts, including desegregation, school finance reform, educational improvement for students with disabilities, charter schools, and standards-based accountability systems. However, many assessments of these efforts reflect limited or mixed success. This Article takes a bird’s-eye view examination of not simply why a single type of educational reform has failed to reach its goals in a particular area, but instead at why such efforts have failed to reach their goals more generally. Drawing insights from both the history of these reform efforts and educational research, this Article analyzes cross-cutting challenges from a perspective that highlights the horizontal and vertical governance structures underlying these reforms. Based on the analysis of these reforms, this Article presents principles for rethinking educational governance in a way that has a greater potential for equalizing and improving students’ learning opportunities and performance

Ruins and Remains: Performative Sculpture and the Politics of Touch in the 1970s

This dissertation investigates the materiality of performative sculpture in the Americas during the long 1970s through artists Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) and Senga Nengudi (1943). United in their disenchantment with second-wave feminism, Buchanan and Nengudi are situated art-historically in the expanded fields of (post)minimalism, conceptualism, and the Black Arts Movement. These artists realize their objects by sourcing non-traditional artmaking materials within what this dissertation conjures as a haptic imaginary—an intervening corrective to both the second-wave feminist and postmodern art imaginaries of the 1970s. Their materials expose the limitations of the visual and offer alternate models of knowing. For Buchanan’s frustulum series (1978-81), poured concrete, and later, tabby concrete, memorializes the textures of architectural sites to honor experiences of labor and displacement. Tabby concrete, a compound binding agent made of sand and lime, is a localized, inexpensive material that was often used by enslaved people in the southern United States, especially in coastal states like Georgia, which provide access to massive deposits of lime-rich oyster shells. Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. series (1977) of pliable pantyhose and sand are anthropomorphic objects originally meant to be activated; they mimic bodily expansion, endurance, and fatigue. Pantyhose, made mostly of nylon, the world’s first fully synthetic fiber, are the product of decades of scientific and economic development, whose intertwined history with World War II offers a springboard to understand the potency of Nengudi’s experiments with the garment. The artists’ materials become sites of investigation into memory, place, body, erotics, and precarity. By offering new epistemological methods of engagement that retaliate against the hegemony of the visual through their twinned interests in ruins for Buchanan, and remains for Nengudi, the artists realize a new womanist politic. Buchanan and Nengudi deploy, respectively, tabby concrete and pantyhose with sand to transmit historical and embodied knowledge. It is precisely through the activated sensorium of touch—imagined and physical—that the past is transmitted and materialized

Examining the Impact of a Videocase-based Mathematics Methods Course on Secondary Preservice Teachers’ Skills at Analyzing Students’ Strategies

This paper focuses on results from a study conducted with two cohorts of preservice teachers (PSTs) in a videocase-based mathematics methods course at a large midwestern university in the US. The motivation for this study was to look beyond whether or not PSTs pay attention to mathematical thinking of students, as shown by previous studies when engaging with video, and, in turn, characterize at a more specific level areas in which PSTs’ responses change. Our findings show that regarding PSTs anticipation of strategies, both cohorts showed a significant increase in the overall number of strategies PSTs were able to anticipate, and a significant increase in the mathematical depth of the anticipated strategies. However, there was no change in terms of PSTs identification and description of high school students’ strategies as displayed in video given that both cohorts of PSTs performed equally proficient at both pre- and post- tests